How to Promote Your App with Xiaomi?

Xiaomi made a name for itself by producing mid-range smartphones that are affordable yet reliable. Their customers do not need or even want all the bells and whistles. They simply wish for phones that will always work when needed, which is what Xiaomi does best.

To give you an idea of just how big the brand is, here are a few quick facts:

• Xiaomi holds the Guinness World Record for selling 2.11 million phones in a day at the 2015 Mi Fan festival, breaking its record in 2014. 
• As of Q1 2022, they hold 12% of the global smartphone market share.
• It holds 19.7% of the European market share in Q1 2022 and always competes for the top three spots with Apple and Samsung. 
• Xiaomi was Indonesia’s best-selling brand in the second quarter of 2021.
• According to the IDC report, Xiaomi is India’s number one smartphone brand and has held this reputation for years. 

A significant player in the Asia Pacific, the Chinese brand is one of the best OEMs to market your app through. Xiaomi sold 38.5 million smartphones with $6.8 billion in total for first-quarter revenue in 2022. 

Mi Ads

Mi Ads is the name of Xiaomi’s advertising networking, which offers a wide assortment of options for people looking to market their apps. The MIUI App family sees a grand total of ten billion daily impressions across their various apps, namely: 

Targeting

Xiaomi’s sophisticated ad targeting will help you pinpoint the perfect market for your advertised apps. In addition, their detailed targeting can sort gender, age, region, time zone, language, and device model. 

You can also get insight into users’ actions like when they install an app, uninstall it, and just how much they use it. This information proves vital in determining just how popular your app is. Furthermore, you’ll be able to see which ads lead to the actual installation. 

Lastly, you can learn about what sorts of games a user is interested in and the intensity of the games. It will help you narrow down your marketing even further. 

Xiaomi offers a targeting package and frequency control to help you craft an effective ad campaign.

Xiaomi Store Vs. Google Play Store

Among all the differences between Xiaomi Store and Google Play Store, the most significant is the conversion result.

(Insert flow differences chart here)

Xiaomi store implements direct download, which means that when a user sees your ad and clicks it, the system will automatically download the app to their phone. 

Even though the process is slightly different from Google Play which redirects the user to the app store after an ad is clicked, it shows that Xiaomi Store generates 3 to 4 times higher conversion results because of this discrepancy in the process. 

Moreover, a high conversion result doesn’t mean it is expensive when advertising your app with Xiaomi. In fact, the cost-per-install (CPI) can be nearly up to 5 times lower compared to an app marketing on Google Play.

(Read: “How to Promote Your App with Oppo“)

Types of Ads

There are a variety of ad spaces available, all operating on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-install pricing model. These are the types of ad spaces that Xiaomi offers: 

Performance-based Native Ads

The performance-based native ads have two visual options. It can be either 1200*628 pixels or 600*314 pixels. Moreover, it will blend in on numerous screens in a discreet fashion. As a result, they appeal to advertisers and users because they’re not obnoxious like some ads can be. 

Icon Ads

These ads are always a popular choice because they do not require any additional creative work on your part. They instead use your app’s icon. This ad has four prime locations: the preload folder, the game folder, the Mi Browser (above the news feed), and recommended app vault section.

Recommended App Ads with Icons

There are also a handful of spaces for icon ads in the GetApps store (formerly known as Mi Picks). Inside the store, Xiaomi will feature your app in the “Must Have” section, the “Hot Search,” and even on the first screen so that users will see your icon as soon as they open the store.

These pages are not crowded, so your icon should not have trouble standing out among the other apps.

Push Notification

The highly coveted push notification space is available, with just a few rules: the main title needs less than 25 characters, and the description should fall between 40 – 45 characters. 

These ads deliver high clickthrough rates (CTR) and return on investment (ROI). However, know that a lot of systems allow users to disable push notifications. That being said, having the option to disable notifications doesn’t necessarily mean that users will take the time to do it.

Pre-Installed/Preloaded App

The pre-installed app is an already installed, licensed app on the user’s new phone. It means that users will undoubtedly interact with the apps directly after they turn on their new phone for the first time. 

It is a frequently applied user acquisition strategy for app publishers that choose to run a performance-based marketing campaign. However, it is not advised for app publishers who want to keep their campaigns cost-effective. 

Past Ad Examples

Xiaomi uses a few ad examples from previous clients as case studies to show potential marketers what can be achieved by advertising on their operating system. 

Hypstar advertised in India, displaying both banner and icon ads in the Mi App store in pursuit of increased downloads. This resulted in 10,000 new downloads daily and a one-day retention rate of 48%.

The social network Helo, also advertised in India, was again looking for more daily downloads. So they paid for launch ads in both GetApps and the Xiaomi browser and saw their daily downloads increase by an impressive 50,000.

Of course, those are just two examples, but it paints a clear picture of the whooping return on investment Helo and Hypstar got from advertising on Xiaomi smartphones. As it stands right now, Xiaomi is the third most popular phone in the world, a claim pretty strongly backed up by these numbers.